Saturday, April 11, 2015

Tel Aviv University spin-off Unispectral proposing a sequential color imaging targets medical and remote analysis applications. Unispectral patented an MEMS optical component suitable for mass production and compatible with standard smartphone camera designs. The combination of this optical component and newly designed software is said to offer superior imaging performance and hyperspectral imaging capabilities. "The optical element acts as a tunable filter and the software — an image fusion library — would support this new component and extract all the relevant information from the image," said Prof. David Mendlovic, one of the Unispectral founders. According to Mendlovic, Unispectral is currently in advanced discussions with major smartphone makers, automotive companies, and wearable device makers to move the technology forward.

Foxnews publishes a video report on Unispectral technology and its applications:

SCIO (Consumer Physics) is based IMHO on a grating, this is basically a tunable Fabry-Perot filter. It'd be interesting to know the spectral resolution, the time required for a scan and the sensitivity. Also, the spectral range is of interest - how far does it go into the NIR? (Note that AFAIK they use a standard CMOS (w/o CFA and cold filter, of course)). Building a VALIDATED database of samples is, of course, a challenge too. Also, note that CP built an actual device (packaging, SW, UX, powering, charging, comms, connection to smartphone); at this stage this is just a sensor.